(The following story by Kirk Mitchell, Jeffrey Leib and Manny Gonzales appeared on The Denver Post website on December 12.)
LITTLETON, Colo. — Transit officials don’t know when a section of the light-rail system in Littleton will reopen after service was halted Tuesday because of a coal-train derailment.
RTD’s rails were damaged when a Union Pacific coal train left its tracks along the Santa Fe Drive corridor about 6 a.m. Tuesday, spilling a massive load of coal onto adjacent RTD light-rail tracks. The wreck then caused the derailment of a light-rail train with 28 passengers aboard.
There were no injuries.
Sgt. Mike Eyman of the Littleton Police Department said the light-rail train’s engineer saw a plume of gray smoke and started to slow down before it hit the coal patch.
“If he would have hit it going at full speed, the likelihood that someone would have been injured or killed is very high,” Eyman said.
RTD identified the light-rail engineer as Robert Vialpando but said he would not comment on the incident.
Aaron Reitsema was nearby when the accident happened. He said the peacefulness of the falling snow was interrupted by the riotous sound of the derailment.
“It was kind of a big, long boom,” Reit sema said. “It sounded like thunder.”
The line was closed south of the Oxford station and affected two stations: Littleton Downtown and Littleton Mineral.
The coal and the twisted, overturned freight-train cars are expected to be cleared out by about 5 a.m. today, but repairing the tracks and restarting service will take longer, Littleton authorities said. RTD is busing passengers to working stations in the meantime.
The railroad is prioritizing the cleanup, said Mark Davis, a Union Pacific spokesman, “to help restore the commuter service as quickly as possible.”
Track snapped
The railroad is expected to fix RTD’s tracks in addition to its own, authorities said.
There will be an investigation into what caused the wreck after the train cars are cleared, Littleton police Sgt. Trent Cooper said.
Investigators said a portion of the track that the coal train ran on snapped, causing 22 cars to derail, but they’re not sure whether that was a result of the accident or whether it caused the derailment.
The accident happened in the 6200 block of South Santa Fe Drive. Northbound lanes of Santa Fe Drive were shut down at C-470 for several hours.
The light-rail train, which was heading north on a parallel track, derailed after it ran over coal that had spilled onto its track.
Davis said the two derailments were just about “simultaneous.”
In recent years, freight railroads have told transit agencies that the companies can no longer allow light-rail trains to operate in close proximity to heavy freight cars. Light-rail cars are not compliant with Federal Railroad Administration crashworthiness standards for operation close to freight trains.
RTD’s southwest line was constructed before the freight railroads issued new rules about compatibility.
(Staff writer Kieran Nicholson contributed to this report.)